In recent years, various image processing technologies have become a hot field in computer science research. Wherein, image synthesis and editing technology based on patches has become a powerful tool for users to edit multimedia contents.
In the prior art, an image editing method based on patches, typically, such as PatchMatch proposed by Barnes et al. in 2009, requires the users to provide semantic guidance or interaction to obtain meaningful results; moreover, in view of edition based on a plurality of images, the users need to search for new objects or regions to synthesize to specified positions; but these all require the users to have a good knowledge of art and master software expertly; meanwhile, in the case of more candidate images, the users need to spend a long time in boring work. The NRDC (non-rigid dense correspondence method) proposed by HaCohen et al. in 2011 can be applied to the above scenario, and it synthesizes an image by automatically searching for appropriate image patches; but the method has the deficiency that the processing speed is too low to meet the demands of real-time image editing, and particularly editing based on an image library. An appropriate image source can be found for the above scenario by adopting an image search method; but the image search method is generally based on global features, and thus cannot be used for finding appropriate optimal partial image regions for editing a local image.
In summary, the main difficulty of image editing based on patches in the image library on the basis of the existing image synthesis technology lies in that image patches used in the editing technology only describe local apparent features and do not describe image patch contents or the image itself, so that contents cannot be effectively organized and searched for in the image library, while the image search method using the global features lacks accurate positioning on local information.